style="font-size:15px;"> Of immortal feet is gone;And your scents have shed their sweetness,
And your flowers are overblown.
And your jewelled gauds surrender
Half their glories to the day;
Freely did they flash their splendor,
Freely gave it—but it dies away.
In the pines, the thrush is waking;
Lo, yon orient hill in flames!
Scores of true-love-knots are breaking
At divorce which it proclaims.
When the lamps are paled at morning,
Heart quits heart, and hand quits hand.
Cold in that unlovely dawning,
Loveless, rayless, joyless, you shall stand!
Pluck no more red roses, maidens,
Leave the lilies in their dew;
Pluck, pluck cypress, O pale maidens,
Dusk, oh, dusk the hall with yew!
—Shall I seek, that I may scorn her,
Her I loved at eventide?
Shall I ask, what faded mourner
Stands, at daybreak, weeping by my side? …
Pluck, pluck cypress, O pale maidens!
Dusk the hall with yew!
THE VOICE.
As the kindling glances,
Queen-like and clear,
Which the bright moon lances
From her tranquil sphere
At the sleepless waters
Of a lonely mere,
On the wild whirling waves, mournfully, mournfully,
Shiver and die;
As the tears of sorrow
Mothers have shed—
Prayers that to-morrow
Shall in vain be sped
When the flower they flow for
Lies frozen and dead—
Fall on the throbbing brow, fall on the burning breast,
Bringing no rest;
Like bright waves that fall
With a lifelike motion
On the lifeless margin of the sparkling ocean;
A wild rose climbing up a mouldering wall;
A gush of sunbeams through a ruined hall;
Strains of glad music at a funeral—
So sad, and with so wild a start
To this deep-sobered heart,
So anxiously and painfully,
So drearily and doubtfully,
And, oh! with such intolerable change
Of thought, such contrast strange,
O unforgotten voice, thy accents come,
Like wanderers from the world’s extremity,
Unto their ancient home!
In vain, all, all in vain,
They beat upon mine ear again—
Those melancholy tones so sweet and still;
Those lute-like tones which in the bygone year
Did steal into mine ear;
Blew such a thrilling summons to my will,
Yet could not shake it;
Made my tost heart its very life-blood spill,
Yet could not break it.
YOUTH’S AGITATIONS.
When I shall be divorced, some ten years hence,
From this poor present self which I am now;
When youth has done its tedious vain expense
Of passions that forever ebb and flow:
Shall I not joy youth’s heats are left behind,
And breathe more happy in an even clime?
Ah, no! for then I shall begin to find
A thousand virtues in this hated time!
Then I shall wish its agitations back,
And all its thwarting currents of desire;
Then I shall praise the heat which then I lack,
And call this hurrying fever, generous fire;
And sigh that one thing only has been lent
To youth and age in common—discontent.
THE WORLD’S TRIUMPHS.
So far as I conceive the world’s rebuke
To him addressed who would recast her new,
Not from herself her fame of strength she took,
But from their weakness who would work her rue.
“Behold,” she cries, “so many rages lulled,
So many fiery spirits quite cooled down;
Look how so many valors, long undulled,
